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Rick scrubbed his face. He hadn’t slept much, and his eyes felt gritty.

“You’d best go see Mama,” added Hereward.

Rick groaned. “God, I don’t think I can!”

“I’ll come with you,” offered Hereward with real heroism.

“You’d do that?”

Hereward lifted one corner of his generous mouth and nodded. “Not that you need be afraid. You’re her favorite, you know.”

“Not after last night,” said Rick gloomily.

However, when the brothers called at Berkeley Square, they found Mama was lying down with a headache and both their brother and sister-in-law were out with her sisters. Only their sister Heather was home.

Heather was their middle sister, Ava being the eldest and lately married (under a cloud of scandal to the Marquess of Ravenshaw), and Ingrid the youngest being still in the schoolroom. Heather had brown hair like Hereward and a comfortable build, with eyes more grey than blue. She was pretty, but was somewhat thrown into the shade by her blonde, blue-eyed sisters, who were both strikingly beautiful in different ways. Ava was a tiny, perfect doll. Ingrid, somewhat taller than both her sisters, even at fourteen, was predicted to become a Nordic goddess in her future.

Heather flew up from the couch, abandoning her embroidery as soon as her brothers were shown into the parlor where she sat with the housecat Emerald, whose green eyes and sleek black coat earned her her name. The cat dislodged from Heather’s lap, rearranged her ruffled fur, and settled in to clean a haunch with aristocratic indifference to the assembled company.

Heather flung her arms around Hereward’s neck. “Herey! I am so glad you came, for I am sure I don’t know what more can befall us!” She turned to Rick and hugged him, too. “Mama will be sorry to have missed you both, but she is quite prostrate.” Her grey eyes surveyed Rick with worry and compassion in their depths. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to upset her and cause a scandal, Rick. But I wish you would explain yourself, for Rob is livid. I thought he was angry over Ava’s scandal, but you have out done her; even Sarah can’t calm him down.”

She drew both her brothers to the two couches and said with gentle insistence, “Please sit and tell me you didn’t mean to hurt that poor girl!”

“Of course not,” said Rick roughly, unable to maintain his usual air of flippant indifference in the face of Heather’s sweet sorrow.

“There! I knew it must be so. Why did you lead Rob to think you did?”

Since Rick didn’t have a very clear idea of this himself, he was at a loss for an answer, but Heather leaned forward and covered his hand where it rested on his knee with her own and said gently, “He put your back up, didn’t he?”

Rick’s face twisted and he nodded. “I suppose so.”

Heather sighed. “Ava is the same, and Ingrid. All three of you cannot abide Robert’s autocracy. If only you understood that he only does it because he cares!”

“Cares about the Layne name,” countered Rick, before he could stop himself. It was an old argument.

Heather shook her head and said softly, “He cares so deeply for all of us, you know. It’s just because he has always had to be the responsible one. Because Papa . . .” She let it trail off, but Rick knew, because he was like his father. The irresponsible one!

After leaving the house, Rick returned to his rooms to be confronted with a nasty reminder of the debt he had incurred the previous evening, the vowel for five thousand pounds falling from the pocket of his jacket onto the carpet. He picked it up and looked at it, his skin prickling uncomfortably. Normally when he ran into debt like this, he took the bills to Robert, and after a painful lecture to which he listened with half an ear, Rob would hand over the amount required to defray the debt and a little extra to tide him over until quarter day. But in the face of their argument this morning, that was impossible. And damn it, he didn’t want to go cap in hand to Rob yet again.

There had to be a way of defraying the debt. But the only way that he could see, short of highway robbery, and even Rick’s dubious morals balked at that notion, was to seek the money at play. And so, he returned for a second night to the Lyon’s Den. And while he won some, he also lost and rose at three in the morning with a second vowel for an additional one and half thousand pounds bringing his total debt to six and half thousand pounds. He went home with a swimming head and a roiling stomach, wondering how, in the space of two days, his life could have become so out of control.

Chapter 3

Cecey spent two days confined to her room and was not summoned into her uncle’s presence again until the afternoon of the third day since her humiliating return from Lady Pennington’s Ball. It was just after five in the afternoon when Aunt Valeria came to hector her into a walking gown, bonnet, and cloak.

“But where are we going?” asked Cecey.

“Your uncle will explain,” was the cryptic response.

Seated in the coach across from her uncle, as Aunt Valeria did not accompany them, she clenched her hands tightly in her lap and said, “Uncle Seb, where are we going?”

“To see a lady who can help you,” he responded.

“Did you speak to the Duke of Troubridge?”

“I did.” Uncle pressed his lips together and looked so forbidding, Cecey’s heart quailed. But this was her life, her future, being decided by men. So she said with an attempt at firmness, “And what did he say?”

“That he refused to believe his brother was so lost to all gentlemanly instincts as to assault a lady, but that he would speak with him.”